I was fortunate enough to be at the OpenStack Design Summit last week in San Antonio, TX and one of the ideas that came up that I found really intriguing was the concept of a single-box easy install for OpenStack Compute (maybe Object Storage could fit on the same machine, not sure yet). To help facilitate this, we started up an OpenStack-Chef mailing list where we’ll be discussing automating installation of OpenStack Compute as well as deploying to a running Compute instance.
Hopefully we’ll free up some time to work on it soon, but while I was there I started putting together some rough specs for a machine we could use for testing and eventually using with Chef training to replace using EC2. We figured we needed enough horsepower to run 20 or so instances on the server, and shoot for around $1000 on the price. Here’s what I found on NewEgg.
- Case: Shuttle SH55-J2-BK-V1 ($220): Will take an Intel Core i5 or i7, 4 memory slots (making RAM much cheaper) and gigabit ethernet in an ever-styling Shuttle case.
- CPU: Intel Core i5-760 Lynnfield 2.8GHz 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1156 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor ($209): There is a i7 for around $280, I’d definitely look at the differences before pulling the trigger. Cheaper dual core options are available as well.
- Memory: 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory ($150×2): no real preference for vendors, 4×4 GB sticks.
- Storage: 240 GB SATA SSD ($420): SSD for the speed, 240 GB should be enough for a demo box with fairly small VMs (figure 10-20 GB each). This is only a SATA 2, so a SATA 3 might be worthwhile (about $100 more) for the speed. A much more economical option would be to RAID0 a pair of WD 640GB drives with 64MB caches for about $110 (it’s a demo box, so why worry about data integrity, or get another and do RAID5).
So really it comes down to about $730 plus whatever storage option you go with. SSD is still expensive but might be worthwhile, but $165 for 1.1TB RAID5 isn’t too shabby and might make running Object Storage a potential option. Prices keep dropping of course, so this is probably close to being out of date already.
The Shining Path of Least Resistance 
